AWESOME-tober-fest 2013: IDW’s Infestation event (2011)

Today we are going to look at a big comic book crossover event from 2011 done by the publisher IDW. It was called Infestation.

The crossover involved four of IDW’s licensed properties; Ghostbusters, Star Trek, Transformers and GI Joe, and one of their own titles; CVO: Covert Vampiric Operations. On the outset, it was exciting to me because I wanted to know how the hell they were going to combine universes. Would Kirk meet Optimus Prime? Would GI Joe try to recruit Egon? The concept brimmed with potential awesomeness.

In case you aren’t familiar, CVO is a group of vampires and other magical beings that work for a clandestine group in the government who fight supernatural attacks on Earth. It’s a pretty cool concept and the group is pretty cool. The story begins at a hidden weapons base in New Mexico. An interdimensional being called the Undermind tries to take over our world. The Undermind is a supernatural entity that takes over beings and turns them into, essentially, zombies who do his bidding. A vampire member of the team, Britt, is bitten by a zombie and becomes a vampire/zombie hybrid. The Undermind uses her dual supernatural nature to make her supremely powerful at wielding magic. Britt opens up portals in four other universes and minions of the Undermind escape into each. We soon discover that each of these portals leads to the worlds of Ghostbusters, Star Trek, GI Joe and Transformers.

Here’s a pic of Britt in her all powerful vampire/zombie form.

In each of the universes the Undermind attacks, an analog of Britt appears. You can see the analogs in the margins of this picture. So in the Transformers universe, Britt actually becomes this weird looking human-faced Transformer (upper left).

Britt is a pretty awesome baddie. She brings to mind one of my other favorite magical villains, Madeline Pryor, the Goblin Queen, from Marvel’s Inferno event in the 90s.

So Britt infiltrates all of these universes, gathers all of this tech and knowledge and uses it to help the Undermind invade and take over our universe. Only the rest of the CVO group can save us.

Overall, it’s a pretty good event. The main story was in Infestation issues 01-02. There were also 2 issues of each of the other properties containing the fight between Britt and GI Joe, Ghostbusters, Transformers and Star Trek. I was honestly a little disappointed that the universes didn’t technically “cross over”. However, this storyline did end up giving us a zombie-fied version of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. And there can never be anything wrong with that.

There was an epilogue mini-series to Infestation called Infestation: Outbreak. It talks about the aftermath of the Undermind battle and the fate of Britt and some of the other members of CVO.

Infestation actually had a sequel that was awkwardly titled Infes2ation. It was released in 2012.